Category: Reading

Spooktober 2025 (and new zine!)

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Alright before I get to the main event, I first have an announcement: I have a new zine out! “Map of the Lost City of Uatdan Wuchke” is an interactive fantasy story in which you, the reader, must draw the map. The zine includes a fold-out drawing surface for readers to use while they read. You can order it online on etsy, and I’ve also just added some bike goblin stickers to my etsy shop, if you’re interested in those.

Now, on to the spooky stuff! Every October I like to read a few horror books, and then review them all together in one post. You can see my previous spooktober posts here. This year I read:

Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr — I always expect multi-author short story collections to be a mixed bag, with some decent stories, some great ones, and some duds. But this book’s got no duds! The worst stories were just decent, and the best had me wanting to read more by their authors. The pieces encompass a great breadth of styles and genres, from blood-and-guts horror to lyrical ghost stories to gritty crime. It was also really fascinating to see so many takes on storytelling, with several of the pieces containing stories within stories. Here were some of my favorites:

  • “Hunger” by Phoenix Boudreau—a beautifully lyrical wendigo story which, three quarters of the way through, switches perspectives to become a kind of monster-of-the-week episode. Both parts well executed.
  • “Scariest. Story. Ever.” by Richard Van Camp—Much like Tenacious D’s “Tribute”, this is not the scariest story ever, but a story about the scariest story ever. The narrator wants to win a scary story contest, so goes to a storyteller to ask him for the scariest story he’s ever heard. The storyteller agrees to pass the story on, but starts by explaining how he came to hear the scariest story ever … wonderfully absorbing, layered, and sticks the landing. This one’s my favorite of the whole collection.
  • “Collections” by Amber Blaeser-Wardzala—a Native American English major goes to her lit professor’s party so she can schmooze a letter of recommendation out of her, and finds that the professor’s house is decorated with human heads. Real heads. No one else seems concerned. Collections.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who’s into horror or dark fiction—with any luck, you may find a new favorite author in there.

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Tabling at Philly Zine Fest, and other updates

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Mark your calendars, Philadelphians! November 1st, 11am-5pm, in Temple University’s Mitten Hall, I will be tabling at Philly Zine Fest! This will be my first time attending a zine fest as a vendor, and I’m very excited. Some things I’ll be selling:

  • All my previously published zines, to wit:
    • “Cartographer”
    • “Fires Burn Forever in this World”
    • “Is Magic School Still Worth It?”
    • “The War on Hormones”
    • Lonely Friends
  • A brand new zine about making a map!
  • Brand new goblin stickers from some of my goblin week drawings!
  • And a couple free things:
    • “Masters of the Wine Printers Guild” zine
    • “Just Dig” 1-sheet

If you are in the Philadelphia area please come by and say hi!

If you’re not able to make it, most of my zines are available on my Etsy, and sometime in November I’ll have the stickers and the new mapmaking zine up there, too.

Some other updates

The main thing I’m working on these days is a comic, One-on-One. I’ve drawn and inked about 20 pages (still need to “color” them in), and I expect the rest of the comic will be another 20 pages. Here’s a few sneak peaks. I hope to be finished with it by the end of the year, and have physical and digital editions up for sale.

On the reading front, I’ve finished Battle Hymn of China by Agnes Smedley and can at last move on to the actual sci-fi books on the list, starting with The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. I’m over a hundred pages into it now and really enjoying it.

Battle Hymn of China was good, and I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who read and enjoyed Daughter of Earth. It’s not as novelistic as that book, much more episodic. Reading all the chapters together, they don’t combine or build on each other too much, but there are a lot of really fascinating episodes.

That said, I’m going to put my utopia/dystopia reading list on pause in October so that I can engage in my annual tradition of reading horror books for the spooky season. This year I plan to read:

  • Never Whistle at Night, edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.
  • No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull
  • A Scout is Brave by Will Ludwigsen
  • And perhaps, if I have time, Strange Pictures by Uketsu, trans. Jim Rion

Look forward to a post about that 🎃. You can see my previous Spooktober posts here.

What I’ll Be Reading, and other updates

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This post is mostly to introduce a reading list that I’m embarking on, but also to provide updates on a couple things.

First, DC 33 is no longer on strike. At the time I’m writing this, members are voting at the union hall on whether or not to ratify the tentative agreement that DC 33 and the city have reached. It will most likely be ratified. I’m very optimistic about the future of DC 33. “If workers end up divided and disorganised after the struggle, this is a defeat, even if something has been gained. If workers come out of the struggle more united and organised, this is a victory, even if some demands remain unmet.” (From We Want Everything by Nanni Balestrini, trans. Matt Holden)

Another update on something I previously announced here: my story “I Remember a One-Sided Die” is now available to read online, free! It was previously only available to subscribers or people who bought the issue, but now anyone can read it. You can also read the interview which Marissa Van Uden conducted with me about the story.

Now, to the main point of the post!

What I’ll Be Reading

I am setting out on a little reading list that I’ve put together. It’s a very specific niche, but a surprisingly populous one: science fiction books by women in which the main character travels between two or more realms governed by contrasting economic and political regimes. These are not books where the two realms are at war (not necessarily, at least), or where one regime must supplant the other. The protagonists are not leaders or warriors, they are travelers, diplomats, emissaries. Some of the books feature anarchism, some communism. I expect to have more thoughts on why this specific treatment of this specific subject has occurred more than once, and why it has always been women writing this*, as I work through the list.

*I didn’t exclude books by male writers from this list, I just didn’t have any! Of books that I’ve read, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy comes closest to qualifying, though those books take place almost entirely within the political realm of Mars, and one regime is supplanted by another there.

These are the books, in the order I plan to read them:

Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley (1929)
Battle Hymn of China by Agnes Smedley (1943)
The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin (1974)
Floating Worlds by Cecelia Holland (1976)
China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh (1992)
Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang, trans. Ken Liu (2016)

The first book is actually not science fiction, it’s an autobiographical novel about a working poor woman growing up, and growing into political consciousness, at the start of the 20th century. And although she moves around a lot, she is always in early 1900s America, a uniformly dystopian capitalist setting. So why is it on this list? Well, the author herself was much like one of the main characters of these novels—shortly after finishing Daughter of Earth, Agnes Smedley moved to China, where she spent the next decade reporting on the nascent Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Civil War. Honestly, the book is on this list because I wanted to read the book, and I incorrectly thought it would cover some of her time in China.

And now it’s been so long since I first drafted this post, I’ve actually finished Daughter of Earth! I really enjoyed it, but it has quite an abrupt ending, so I’ve decided to just go ahead and read Battle Hymn of China, which as I understand it is a mix of autobiography and reportage covering most of Smedley’s time in China.

It would be cool if I posted a review for each of these books as I finished them, wouldn’t it? Yeah. Maybe I will. Probably not. But I will definitely periodically update the “Reading” section on my homepage as I move from one book to another.

If you have read any of these books, or want to suggest any additions that fit my narrow parameters, or if you want to read along (??), please write to me or comment below!

New Publication: “I Remember a One-Sided Die” in Apex Magazine

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I’m thrilled to announce that I have a short story out in this month’s issue of Apex Magazine! The story, “I Remember a One-Sided Die,” is about an alien species with a strange way of perceiving time and memories, and is narrated by one of those aliens. This is my first story to appear in a magazine in a while, and the longest story I’ve ever had in a magazine, so I’m pretty excited to have it out there! I was also interviewed for this publication by Marissa Van Uden, so after you’ve read the story you can read that interview to see where the idea for this story came from, and how I developed it.

You can read the story and the interview right now if you buy the issue, or you can wait a month and both will be posted on Apex’s website, free to read. I’ll probably share that link in a future blog post as well, when it’s available.

Other news!

I don’t think I’ve actually mentioned it on this blog yet, but back in January I finally finished editing the book I’d been working on for most of the past two years! Currently I’m taking a break from it/waiting to hear back from readers, and later in this year I’ll start querying agents.

I’m also just taking a break from writing in general … although I am editing some short stories I wrote last year … but no new writing! Instead, I’ve been gearing up to making a short comic. I’ve never really intentionally set out to make a comic before, other than LYCC—and that was like a diary comic, so it didn’t require any overarching planning or character development. So this will be a bit of an adventure for me. Right now I’m mostly warming up to drawing again, trying to make it a habit, and I’ve been trying to draw a little 4-panel comic every day. I may clean some of those up and post them here at some point.

That’s the main news from me. Here’s a video of me biking up the SRT to Norristown yesterday.

Spooktober 2024

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A larger than life size skeleton posed with arms raised in front of an obelisk grave in the Woodlands cemetery in Philadelphia

Every year around October I like to read horror books and you can see all my previous posts about that here and this is this year’s post.

This year I had a couple false starts with some really insipid contemporary horror novels, so I wasted time on those and didn’t finish them, and only ended up reading one prose horror novel—a novella, actually, Low Kill Shelter by Charity Porpentine Heartscape. I also read the graphic novel A Guest in the House by E.M. Carroll, and I watched a bunch of movies, and I went to some graveyards, so I’m just gonna throw all that into this post too. Enjoy! 🎃

What I’ve Been Reading

Low Kill Shelter by Charity Porpentine Heartscape – A virus has spread across the world which turns its victims rabid, and causes canine-like changes in their jaws. But it hasn’t spread so thoroughly that society has collapsed—in fact, the world is still running along as normal. You still have to work. And everyone has given up on discovering a cure, even the companies supposedly funded to do that. The officially sanctioned cure now is just to execute the infected person.

The novella follows a man who is keeping his infected friend chained up in a closet in his apartment, studying him and trying to find a cure on his own.

This is quintessential Porpentine—a dead-eyed vision of the world which brings the grotesque and the banal smashing together, transgressive in a way that doesn’t feel like just a stunt, transgression as a by-product of probing deep into pain, discomfort, and rabid desires. The book excels in attitude, style, and narrative voice, but the plotting felt a little stilted. At a certain point it just starts going from one archetypal monster movie scene to another, and loses the extreme tension, the claustrophobia, the push-and-pull dynamic of the beginning. Overall I enjoyed it, but it lost its edge about halfway through.

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Public Domain Day 2024: The Silencing and Rediscovery of “Life in the Iron Mills”

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Happy Public Domain Day! Today, works from 1928 enter the public domain in the US and many other countries! Most infamously, this is the year that Steamboat Willie, the ur-Mickey Mouse, enters the public domain. The Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain has a great write-up on what’s entering PD this year, as well as a detailed post about the Mickey Mouse situation.

As I do every year, I’m celebrating by ceding one of my own works to the public domain: “Just Dig”! This is one of the first stories I self-published, back in 2017. It’s a very short story about asteroid prospectors and luck. Has kind of a western vibe to it. It’s good! I’ll eventually upload it in more formats and update the ebook version on Smashwords, but for now you can read it in this single-sheet, printable version. To read my other posts about the Public Domain, or my other works in the public domain, go here.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to highlight a piece of writing which has been in the public domain for over a century, and which I love—”Life in the Iron Mills” by Rebecca Harding Davis.

“Belmont Iron Works Advertisement,” from “Directory of the City of Wheeling & Ohio County,” 1851. Digitized by the Ohio County Public Library.

This is a short story first published in The Atlantic in 1861, describing a few fateful nights in the life of Hugh Wolfe, a worker in an iron mill. The story was sensational and much acclaimed when it was published, and ahead of its time as far as exposés of the American underclass—this was decades before Jacob Riis and Upton Sinclair. However, the story and Harding Davis fell into obscurity for a while, before being re-introduced to the world in 1972 by writer and literary scholar Tillie Olsen. Olsen, an editor at Feminist Press at the time, published a new edition of the story, along with a lengthy biographical essay about Rebecca Harding Davis, drawing parallels between the thwarted creative efforts of the character Hugh and those of the writer. Olsen then expanded on this idea in Silences, a book about authors whose output was stifled or cut short by their socioeconomic circumstances (e.g. being a woman, being poor.)

I mention all this because 1. reading Silences is how I discovered “Life in the Iron Mills,” 2. I think Silences is required reading for anyone serious about being a writer, and 3. this cultural transmission is a triumph of the public domain. “Life in the Iron Mills” probably entered public domain in 1917, if not earlier. If it had been subject to our current laws, it wouldn’t have entered public domain until 1980, 70 years after Harding Davis’s death. Tillie Olsen would have had to track down the author’s estate and pay for the copyright. If she couldn’t find the estate, or couldn’t reach an agreement with it, she would’ve had to wait eight years for it to enter public domain. Basically my point is that our fucked copyright law is another form of silencing.

If you want to read “Life in the Iron Mills” now you can read it on Project Gutenberg, or you can get the 2020 edition of it from Feminist Press, which includes Olsen’s biographical essay, a few other short stories by Davis, and a new foreword by Kim Kelly. I would not recommend the 2020 edition though. Kelly’s foreword adds nothing, and the story itself contains several typos—right away there’s a typo in the epigraph, and later on an entire paragraph is missing! I would recommend just reading the story, then reading Silences, which does include a version of Olsen’s biographical essay on Harding Davis.

You can also read it in this little zine edition I made! And here’s a print-imposed version, you can just print this 2-sided, short-edge binding, and it’ll come out perfect.

I put this zine together over a year ago, just as a proof of concept for making little booklets like this, and I think I did a pretty good job. Nota bene: I included Olsen’s introductory note, so this zine is not public domain! This zine is illegal! But I think Olsen’s note is so good, one of the best introductions to a literary work I’ve ever read—probably because it’s so brief. So I will take her lead and not waste any more of your time.

Happy Public Domain Day!

New Edition of “The War on Hormones”, Year in Review, and More!

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I’ve got a bunch of little announcements to make so I’m throwing them all together in this post, roughly in descending order of importance.

Free Zines!

As promised, here is the 4th and final zine of 2023! This one is a re-issue of a novelette I previously published as an ebook, “The War on Hormones.” It’s about pharmaceutically asexual teenagers at a performing arts high school, and I wrote it when I myself was in 12th grade. Despite or because of this, I think it holds up! I had fun rereading it, anyway, and only made a few minor edits for clarity. I also cut the afterword to keep it a more conveniently printable length.

This new zine edition is free! Just email me at Francis.R.Bass [at] gmail [dot] com and I’ll send you a copy. You can also still buy the old ebook version on Smashwords if you want to throw me some money.

Also, if you would like any of the zines I’ve previously released, now is your last chance to get them for free, with free shipping!

To wit, that is:

  • “Cartographer,” a grotesque fantasy about a person lost in the colossal corpse of their god, and the mapmaker they always end up returning to. (LOW STOCK)
  • “Masters of the Wine Printers Guild,” an economic fantasy about a conspiracy of apprentices who decide to defy the masters and print their own wine;
  • “Is Magic School Still Worth It?”, a fantasy short story about trying to put a price tag on our nobler aspirations (i.e., magic.);
  • And “Fires Burn Forever in This World,” a short story about a city where the antiquated practice of leaving firefighting to private insurance companies has persisted right up to the modern era..

If you missed out on one of these before, or if you really liked one and want another copy to share with a friend, let me know! Going forward I will be charging for my zines like the mercenary wretch I am. So get them while you can, orders close Jan 1st.

Year in Review

It’s been a pretty quiet year on the magazine front, but a big year for self-publishing stuff. There are all those zines of course, and also a new collection of short stories which I released as an ebook, Stories About Kids Stealing Things. The book collects seven stories about people with very little ability to control their own lives, and no ability to control the world at large. They are going to try anyway.

It’s also probably the coolest cover I’ve ever made.

I wrote a very long and very negative review of The Parable of the Sower. I mean, I wrote plenty of other reviews this year, but I think this one came out really well, and even if you don’t care about the book, the review gets at some of the things I find lacking in dystopian fiction. If you only read one of my posts from this year, read that one.

No new publications in magazines this year, but I did have one reprint—my story “The Mechanical Turk Has a Panic Attack” appeared on Escape Pod! This is a story I really love, and it was great to have my work appear in such a prominent institution of contemporary short sci-fi.

Not much other than that! I am still writing this fucking novel, the one I mentioned I’d started back in April. It is about 2x the length I expected it to be. I will hopefully have the first draft finished in January, and then can spend the next year writing short stories. I like writing novels, and I honestly think this one is going to come out amazing, but I think I am just too artistically promiscuous to write long projects like this one all the time. Like I cannot imagine committing myself to another novel right after I finish this one. So I’m looking forward to being a narrative slut next year.

Public Domain Day

Public Domain Day approaches! Each year on January 1st, Public Domain Day, I celebrate by releasing one of my works to the public domain. Last year, some friends and fellow artists joined me in this, ceding some of their works as well. If you would like to do the same this year, let me know so I can link to the work you’re ceding in my post! The work can be a song, a photo, a short story—anything you’ve made and would like to release forever to the commons.

For more info on Public Domain Day, you can check out my page on it, or the post from last year.

Happy holidays, see you January 1st!

What I’ve Been Reading, Spooktober 2023

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The month of spooktober has passed, but autumn, the season of death, still surrounds us. So today I bring you reviews of the books I read this October. For the past several years this has been a tradition of mine, reading a bunch of spooky books around this time of year, though I’ve only made a post reviewing them all once. Hopefully from this year forward, that can be part of the tradition too.

Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon — Boy’s Life is narrated by Cory Mackenson, a middle-aged writer looking back on a pivotal year of his life growing up in the small town of Zephyr, Alabama. The book is divided into four main parts, each corresponding with a season, starting in spring and ending in winter. The year in question is the year Cory turns 12, and the year he and his father stumble upon a murder victim drowned in Saxon’s Lake, an old flooded quarry. That murder, and the mystery of the victim’s identity, let alone the killer’s, is the main throughline of the novel.

However, this book is over 600 pages, and it is not 600 pages of Encyclopedia Brown working one case. Instead, the book is composed of episodic chapters detailing various different adventures in Zephyr. Sometimes these chapters reveal a little more about the murder mystery, but usually they don’t. They often don’t even relate to one another, and they vary greatly in terms of tone and genre. One chapter is about a new kid in town who turns out to be a baseball prodigy; another is a monkey’s paw-esque story about the death of the family dog; another finds Cory abducted by a member of a moonshining clan. These chapters don’t really connect or build up to a larger narrative arc, aside from the arc of Cory growing up. Characters enter and exit like stage actors. They arrive, they play their part to a tee, and then they leave. Even Cory’s main group of friends really only shows up when they’re a central part of the chapter, but otherwise they have no involvement with the murder mystery or any other misadventures.

Because each chapter is so totally committed to its trope or theme or genre, McCammon never holds back. He gets to the good stuff right away, every time. The lake monster isn’t going to come back later, so the first chapter where it appears doesn’t waste time with just a little ripple in the water, or a half-glimpsed fin, no—the lake monster makes a full appearance and attacks Cory! Lots of the chapters feel like B-movies that have been fast-forwarded right to the climax. So instead of a tightly woven story where each thing leads to the next, you get a multigenre smorgasbord of all killer no filler one-off adventures. It’s a trade-off which I was happy to accept.

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New Publication: Stories About Kids Stealing Things

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And a new zine publication! It’s a two for one today!

First, Stories About Kids Stealing Things is now out on Smashwords! Wow, cool cover!

Collected in this book are seven short stories, mostly written between 2018-2019. They’re not all about kids stealing things, but most of them are.

Two teens take climate justice into their own hands by stealing from the rich and giving to themselves; AI can’t drive for shit; bearing someone else’s nostalgia for a world long dead; don’t let someone slip a love potion in your cup; your awful ex-boss is running for governor of your failing state, better stop him; privatized firefighting and year-long fires; don’t predict the future, predict the prophecy.

These are stories about people with very little ability to control their own lives, and no ability to control the world at large. They are going to try anyway.

Here’s a full list of the stories collected here, you may see some you’ve read already:

“Fuck You Pay Me,” “Ride of the Blind Sighthound,” “The Hilarious Inside Joke of Our Overwhelming Melancholic Nostalgia,” “Love Poison,” “The Harrowing of Castle Maddox,” “Fires Burn Forever in this World,” and “Red, Her Hand.”

That second to last one, “Fires Burn Forever in this World,” is also now available as a print zine! For free! It’s a short story about a city where the antiquated practice of leaving firefighting to private insurance companies, and letting uninsured buildings burn, has persisted right up to the modern era. And also fires burn for a very, very long time. If you would like a copy, email me at FrancisRBass [at] gmail [dot] com. Check out some interior artwork for it at left!

What’s Next

I am going to make one more short story zine this year. It will be a re-issue of a novelette previously published as an ebook, “The War on Hormones”. A story about pharmaceutically asexual high schoolers, which I wrote while in high school myself. Pretty fun! Expect it in November or December.

And that will conclude this pilot program of zine making! I started making zines last September with “Cartographer.” Since then I’ve made three other zines, and “The War on Hormones” will make five total. I’ve been giving them away for free because I was still figuring things out, experimenting, and I really just wanted to get the things in people’s hands.

So starting next year, they will (mostly) no longer be free. I am also probably not going to release as many new zines next year, maybe just one or two.

Read: I have really enjoyed making these and giving them to y’all, and would like to make this one of the pillars of my career, such as it is. So I am going to spend next year figuring out how to do this sustainably. More thoughts on this probably when I release the next zine.

Also, non sequitur, Spooktober is upon us, this year I am reading Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon, Night Bitch by Rachel Yoder, and Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge.

Okay that’s all I’ve got for you now! Is that enough???

What I’ve Been Reading, September 2023

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Got a bit of a grab bag this time around. One long review of The Agony and the Ecstasy, a shorter review of A Fine Balance, and a shortest review of The Hard Tomorrow. Also, after all that, some news about two writing projects I’m putting out this month, and an opportunity to place an ad in my zine! Pick your poison.

The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone is a biographical novel about Michelangelo. It starts when he is 13, about to be apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio, and continues throughout his entire life, right up to his death at age 88. The plot is pretty much exhaustive—no part of Michelangelo’s life is omitted, though some is summarized, especially towards the end.

Initially, I concluded that “The Agony and the Ecstasy is a hack job, and it is glorious.” By “hack job” I meant that there’s really no artistry to it. Irving Stone is not making artistic decisions about how to represent things, he is not emphasizing certain moments over others. Every bit of information, every major event, is dutifully transposed into a kind of dramatized biography. This changes slightly towards the end, which I’ll explain more below, but I think my initial impression still applies to 90% of the book. No one should read this who does not want to read a 600-page biography of Michelangelo.

That’s not to say Stone is unskilled, not at all. The drama is compelling, the dialogue and narration are effective. He is rendering well, but he is only rendering. There’s no attitude, no flair, no vision. He is like David, an artist in the studio of Ghirlandaio who Stone describes thus: “David had been well trained in enlarging to scale the individual sections and transferring them to the cartoon itself, which was the dimension of the church panel. This was not creative work, but it took skill.”

The single biggest artistic choice Stone made, and it is a bold one, is writing this book at all. Michelangelo lived a long life, so treating his life with the intense level of researched detail that Stone employs does require commitment, belief, a supreme confidence in the worthiness of the material. This is a hack job in that it lacks any creativity, but it is an uncommon hack job, one which took a tremendous amount of care and effort to complete.

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Review: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

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EDIT: This post previously misattributed quotes to the Camden mayor, which were in fact made by the Director of the Camden County Board of Commissioners.

Negative review time! It’s time for a negative review!

I never write negative reviews—I mean fully negative, not just a mixed bag—because I rarely finish books that I really dislike. And then if I do, I don’t want to waste even more energy writing about it. But Parable of the Sower is beloved and lauded, and Octavia Butler is basically canonized by the current crop of SFF writers, so I think a full review is worth my while and yours. Maybe it will shed some light on common failings in dystopian lit, maybe it will make other people who disliked this book feel less insane, maybe it will just be fun!

There will definitely be some spoilers, if you can spoil something that is already rotten.

Introduction

Parable of the Sower is narrated by Lauren Olamina, a young girl living in Orange County, in the year 2024. The United States is collapsing into poverty and lawlessness, and is backsliding into oligarchy, all apparently driven by global warming. Things start bad and get a lot worse. Strike that: things start bad for Lauren’s last-gasp-of-the-middle-class enclave, and get a lot worse. For the poor, the misery is pretty abject from the very beginning.

The book has two major parts, about equal in length. In the first half, when things are only bad, Lauren is preparing for the worst, and trying to get her community to do so as well. This preparation mainly entails making bug out bags and reading books about foraging, first aid, etc. Also she wants to start a religion, “Earthseed,” which recognizes change as the only God, and as a fundamental force which people must accept and work through. She develops this religion, writing its holy verses, in secret.

In the second half, her community has been obliterated, and she travels north with a few survivors, hoping to find somewhere they can resettle. They join a mass migration north, and occasionally add new members to their group. Lauren starts to share Earthseed with them. They are attacked multiple times.

Also Lauren has a psychosomatic hyper-empathy condition triggered by the apparent physical sensations of others. It’s not plot-relevant or theme-relevant, and it’s barely character development-relevant, so I will not mention it again.

That is the basic story-shape of the book. There is a sequel, I haven’t read it.

What’s really strange is that this book is not good any way you turn it. With books I dislike, I can usually see the element that people enjoy in them. I cannot see it here. It fails, or is at most subpar, on all counts.

Let’s start with the loftiest of traditions which this book attempts to engage, which is societal critique. This is generally how this book is framed when people describe or recommend it—a cautionary tale of where we’re heading, or (jerk off motion) a prescient vision of where we are!! Oooo!! Octavia Butler warned us!!! (jerk off motion)

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Reprint: “The Mechanical Turk Has a Panic Attack”

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My story “The Mechanical Turk Has a Panic Attack” is newly available in audio form, at Escape Pod! Wow!! The story was first published a year ago at Uncharted Magazine, and now you can listen to it, narrated by Valerie Valdes, produced by Summer Brooks, and with some host commentary from Tina Connolly. It’s a story about a server in a high-end but not quite high-end-enough restaurant pretending to be an android. The title is the plot, essentially.

I’ve said it many times before, this is one of my favorite pieces from the past few years, and it does a lot of the stuff I really want to do with SFF writing. Check it out! And if you’ve read it already, it’s definitely worth a listen, as Valdes does a wonderful job on the narration.

Some other stuff

I still have copies of “Is Magic School Still Worth It?” available! They are still free! Go here to read more about that.

I recently read “Questioning the Bipedal Default” by friend and fellow SFF person M.E. White, published in the October 2018 issue of Worldbuilding Magazine. It’s an in-depth look at the evolution of bipedalism in humans, with speculations on whether or not it’s a prerequisite to intelligent alien life. Very worthwhile read for SFF writers, or anyone into evolutionary bio!

And to close things out, here’s some videos I took while biking around the Navy Yard, an old semi-disused industrial park at the far south end of Philadelphia. (Although the first clip is from another day, earlier this year, crossing Grays Ferry Bridge.) 🚴‍♂️🚴‍♂️🚴‍♂️

New Publication: Is Magic School Still Worth It?

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multiple copies of the zine. the covers have the title, a small glove insignia, and the initials FB

“Is Magic School Still Worth It?” is out now! It is available exclusively in print! It is for FREE! Here’s the synopsis:

Ezze recently graduated from magic school, but she hasn’t practiced magic at all since then. She volunteers at a magazine, works at a hotel, and had to sell her silkbud glove to get by. When the magazine assigns her to write an article about whether or not magic school is still worth it, she struggles to find an answer.

The zine itself is staple-bound, with a hand-lettered cover. If you’re curious how I made it, this post about an earlier short story goes into some more detail on the process.

Email me at FrancisRBass (at) gmail (dot) com if you would like a copy! If you live in Philly I can hand-deliver it to you, if you live elsewhere in the US I’ll mail you one. If you live elsewhere outside the US, I may ask you to cover postage, but should still be able to get you a copy.

Upcoming Publications

There will be two more free zines this year. They will be “Fires Burn Forever in This World” (new!) and a re-issue of “The War on Hormones” (old, but newly in print!) I will also release, in ebook form, a collection of short stories from the past few years, which will be titled Stories About Kids Stealing Things. That one will not be free.

Also very soon (maybe later this month?), my story “The Mechanical Turk Has a Panic Attack” will gain a second life at Escape Pod! It was previously published in Uncharted Magazine in 2022, and now it will be published in audio form as well. I’m very excited for that, I hope you are too.

Until then!

What I’ve Been Reading, February 2023

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Yes! I am still reading! In fact, there is a section on my homepage where you can see what I am reading right now, which I update every month or so, with little snippets of my current impressions of the books.

These three books I’m reviewing here aren’t all that I have been reading, but they’re what I felt like writing about at greater length in the past few months.

I finally finished Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, read by John Lee, which I’ve been listening to off and on since July. It’s a secondary world fantasy set in the enormous, early industrial metropolis of New Crobuzon. New Crobuzon is full of all kinds of different hominids, including bug people, cactus people, hand parasite people??? The book’s main trio, at least at the beginning, is the scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, his romantic partner Lin—a bug person artist—and Yagharek. Yagharek is an exiled bird person (these different groups all have actual terms in the book, but I’m just gonna call him a bird person) who has had his wings removed, and he has come to New Crobuzon to see if Isaac can restore to him the power of flight.

The strongest point of the story is the city. It is riotous, expansive, and intensely detailed. Every neighborhood, every little enclave, is a whole world unto itself—just like a real city! There isn’t just The Bug Person Neighborhood, there are actually multiple, which fall into their own hierarchy among each other, with different cultures and different relations to the powerful of the city.

The trouble with the book, and the reason my progress with it slowed down about halfway through, is that the main antagonist basically flattens all this detail. The book switches focus from Isaac’s attempts to help Yagharek fly again, and Lin’s dealings in the sordid art world, and becomes a monster story. A big soul-sucking moth creature from a far away land is loose in the city, and everyone is powerless to stop it. I say it flattens things because this monster has essentially the same relationship with every neighborhood. The differences between the neighborhoods, their cultures, their inhabitants, what type of hominid they are, are all irrelevant. Everyone is equally powerless against this moth. Whereas before, Isaac, a standard human person, has different relationships with all the neighborhoods. Some are totally hostile to him, some he can mingle with easily. In some neighborhoods he doesn’t want to be seen publicly with Lin, in others he is open about his relationship. And likewise, every characters has a different orientation to any given neighborhood.

Like when Lin and Isaac visit a squat of bird people within the city, Isaac unwittingly makes an ass of himself, arrogant and offensive to the locals. Lin, being from an oppressed group herself, can see how abrasive Isaac is being, and tries to get him to leave before he does more damage.

The moth creature flattens this. Our heroes still have to move throughout the city as they try to fight it, and this does occasionally produce some of that sparkling detail and cultural friction which I so enjoyed in the beginning, but its more rare. Two other major characters are introduced, who are also as unique and separate from the city as the moth.

And it’s not that this monster narrative is bad, it’s just such a step down from what was developing before. I mean imagine if in A Song of Ice and Fire, after setting up all these different houses and characters, the second book immediately changed to focus on an invasion of white walkers who sweep across Westeros in indiscriminate carnage. Not bad necessarily, but it’s a waste! This moth story could’ve happened anywhere, it could’ve happened in London or Ankh-Morpork or Gotham.

Nevertheless, it’s a great book overall. Miéville employs a realism that goes beyond some dirt under the fingernails and missing teeth—it’s a realism of attitude, outlook. Most of the characters are subject to powers far beyond their control. The ones that are in power are not evil or righteous—no good kings, no kings at all actually, just an iron-fisted mayor and various apparatuses of violence under his command. Everything’s a little shitty, a little petty, a little casual. You live here. And that realism of attitude, combined with his fantastic, iridescent worldbuilding, is what has me eager to read more of Miéville, and wishing I’d started reading him sooner.

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Public Domain Day 2023: Now With 400% More Artists!

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Happy Public Domain Day! This is my sixth year of celebrating Public Domain Day by releasing one of my works to the public domain, and this year I’ve reached out to get some other people involved. So not only are works from 1927 entering the public domain (you can read more about that here), and not only is something by me entering public domain, but also works from Trevor Neil White and I. Riva are now free for anyone to read, share, copy, and modify!

The short story “Feeding Day” by Trevor Neil White is a series of intersecting vignettes set in a world where the two-party system also happens to have a digestive system.

“Barrow Sentinel” by I. Riva is a short story in the style of an oral folk tale—a warning to would-be adventurers and “heroes.”

EDIT: Two more artists have joined in! “Way Down in the Country Mud” by Rybin is a short science fantasy story about a young man trying to survive and find some meaning in a rapidly collapsing society.

And Miranda White is ceding “The Weeping Statue”, a short, weird Game Boy fable about identity, friendship, and birbs. Playable in browser, Game Boy emulator, or on a Game Boy flash cartridge. Also in the public domain, available as a separate download: original .mod chiptunes, sprite sheets, and pixel art backgrounds from the game, plus a few bonus pieces that didn’t make it in.

Lastly, my novelette “Masters of the Wine Printers Guild” is an economic fantasy about a conspiracy of apprentices who decide to defy the masters and print their own wine. To simplify things, I made a specific page for it which has downloads in a bunch of file formats, including a pre-formatted, easily printable zine! I have jokingly described this as a story about printing a zine with a bunch of your friends (except the zine is magic wine), so it only seemed fitting. You can check it all out here.

Going forward, I would love to keep having other artists join me in celebrating Public Domain Day in this way. It is abundantly clear that lawmakers are not going to make the radical changes to copyright law that we need, so I believe it falls to creators to give back to the commons proactively. Shout out to everyone who joined me this year, and if anyone would like to join me next year, or is doing something similar, please let me know! You can also find my previous posts about the public domain, and my works therein, here.

Now, for some unrelated end-of-year things.

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Making the “Cartographer” Zine, and the Possibilities of Print

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A photo of the booklets. the covers are blue cardstock with white lettering. they each bear a spiral, the word "cartographer", and my initials—"FB".
In all their glory.

This post was originally just an unlisted page on my website, exclusively accessible through a QR code in the back of the print edition of “Cartographer.” But I think the ideas here may be of general interest, whether you’ve read “Cartographer” or not, so with some modifications I’m posting it to the blog!

Contents

The Possibilities of Print

So my first major premise is that reading on a screen sucks. It sucks because a lot of people already spend most of their day staring at a screen. It sucks because you are staring into a light source. It sucks because that light source is always refreshing, shooting 60 images at you every second. It sucks because there is other stuff on that screen that can distract you—even if you are good at focusing, notifications can still pop up depending on the device. (I do see the irony that you are reading on a screen right now—but I think these annoyances are more tolerable for short texts.)

E-readers are the exception. Although it’s still a screen, most e-readers use e-ink displays, not LCDs. The display reflects light, like paper, rather than shining it at you, and it has a much lower refresh rate—the text just sits there, stable, until you “turn” the page.

Turning pages in itself is another benefit of e-readers. There is some satisfaction gained with each page turn that is totally absent with scrolling. As I understand it, this is part of why kids’ books are printed with large text and broad margins—to provide a sense of accomplishment even when reading relatively little, relatively slowly. Each page turn is a little mile marker surpassed. Even as an adult, I find my brain switching modes depending on how much white space there is on a page. Big, chunky paragraphs: serious reading ahead. Dialogue and two-sentence paragraphs: yes lets go fast fast fast!

With all that said, there are two problems with e-readers, from a writer/publisher perspective. First, not everyone has one. I read a ton, and have done so for a while, and I only just got my first e-reader a few months ago. They can be pricy, at least compared to the free pair of eyeballs in your head.

The second major issue is that ebooks are a pain in the ass to design, and you basically can’t guarantee they will look nice across multiple devices. Ebook files are like html files, in that they are meant to display the same content across multiple different devices and apps. The content stays the same, but the style and layout might shift. E.g. Chapter 4 of a .epub may start on page 100 on a computer, page 200 on a phone, and page 150 on an e-reader. That’s pretty minor, but there are bigger issues when it comes to style. “Keep with next” doesn’t seem to work, ever. Drop Caps look dramatically different across different devices, with the one commonality that they all look equally jank (check out this article about it and scroll down to the example screenshots.) Why do websites look good and consistent across devices, and ebooks don’t? My guess is that it’s because the corporations selling the e-readers do not want cross-compatibility. Amazon even has its own file format. There is no effort at coordination, no effort to make an ebook look good if it wasn’t purchased through the given e-reader’s marketplace. I guess people think books are just text, and who cares about the container.

Well, I care about the container! Sitting on a park bench and unfurling a risograph-printed brochure to read about architecture, I can tell you from experience, it rules. The same text on a computer screen in my stupid bedroom, or on a phone screen at my stupid job—that would not rule. The text can still be very good. It can be transcendent, and someone reading it can recognize and appreciate it as such. But the actual reading experience will be worse. (For instance, I read most of Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me on the Bluefire Reader mobile app [barf] during rehearsals. Great book, awful way to read it.)

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New Publication: Cartographer

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Hey, it’s a new novelette! It’s actually pretty old, but I’m finally getting around to publishing it, and you can get it now on Smashwords!

Also, if you would like a physical copy of this thing *for free,* I will be posting some details about that on Twitter shortly (edit: Here.) Or you can email me and I’ll let you know about it when I’ve got the details figured out. Essentially: I have been very intrigued by zines and cheap printing lately, and I think sometime in the future I would like to incorporate that into how I sell my stories. Having a little booklet is, I think, so much nicer than staring at a screen. Turning a page rules, and scrolling ceaselessly does not (unless you are using a physical scroll maybe.) For now, I just want to do this as a proof of concept, so I will be charging the low price of *nothing* for a physical copy of this novelette. Though if you want to show your support by also buying a digital copy, I will certainly not stop you.

Here’s the synopsis: Si Muue is lost in the colossal subterranean corpse of their god. Separated from their family, their memory deteriorating, they arrive at the home of a cartographer just in time. The cartographer, Lio P, draws them a map in exchange for a detailed account of their travels through rotting innards and cavernous bones. However, the two disagree on the shape of God: Lio P believes God resembled a godson, like him, while Si Muue believes God was not like any mortal race, but was a mixture of all of them.  

And when Si Muue ventures forth, they soon become just as lost as before, and return to the cartographer. Again they receive a new map, and again they are lost, over and again, until their memories are all a confused mix, and they can’t tell dream from reality, and it seems they will never escape this decaying underworld.

“Cartographer” is a grotesque fantasy, a story of torment, survival, and despair. Lost in bloody darkness, the only way is forward.

CW: Violence

New Publication: “The Mechanical Turk Has a Panic Attack” in Uncharted Magazine

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Plates showing the mechanical turk, a machine made to look as though it is an automaton playing chess, while really a person is crouched inside it controlling everything.
Plates from Ernest Wittenberg’s 1960 article “Échec!”, about the actual mechanical turk

A bit delayed in announcing this, but I’ve got a new story up on Uncharted Magazine! It’s about a server in a high-end but not quite high-end-enough restaurant pretending to be an android. I mean, the title is the plot, essentially. It’s really good! Seriously, this is probably my favorite thing I’ve written in the past couple years, and I’m so pleased to have it published. You can read it over on Uncharted Magazine.

New Publication: “The Hilarious Inside Joke of Our Overwhelming Melancholic Nostalgia” in Solarpunk Magazine

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My story “The Hilarious Inside Joke of Our Overwhelming Melancholic Nostalgia” is in the inaugural issue of Solarpunk Magazine, just published today! Solarpunk Magazine is a new magazine publishing writing and artwork that grapples with climate change and “demand[s] utopia.” The first issue is extra-large, with 6 short stories, 3 poems, and 4 nonfiction articles. It even includes an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson! You can purchase it here. EDIT: You can also read or listen to my story online here!

My story is set in a future Florida radically changed by climate change, where “Crimes Against the Future” are punished by implanting memories of the world before, the world lost to rising sea levels and changing ecologies. Kyra, whose older brother has been punished in this way so many times that the implanted memories have become permanent, wants to commit a crime so she can know what the old world was like herself.

New(ish) Publication: Classic Cage

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In honor of Public Domain Day, I’m ceding my play Classic Cage to the public domain! Classic Cage was produced by Theatre Cedar Rapids as part of the 2019 Underground New Play Festival, and later published in issue 3 of some scripts. And now it’s free for all to read, modify, and perform! Nota bene, this play could very easily, minimally, be adapted to be performed over zoom, since it already takes place entirely through video calls—that’s right, I wrote a zoom play before it was cool!

Here’s the synopsis:

Tara Cage is struggling to sell her next book. Publishers on Mars want another of her cheerful, optimistic Earth travelogues, the ones that made her so popular, but things have been getting bad on Earth. Climate change and economic upheaval have made Tara a lot more cynical, and sick of selling Mars a whitewashed version of her home planet. Her sister and literary agent, Michaela Cage, tries to grease the wheels with a potential publisher by getting a realtime FTL video connection between them on Mars and Tara on Earth. Unfortunately Tara’s internet connection has been screwy, making the video chat’s predictive AI patch over moments of lag with an AI version of Tara, compiled from calls made by Tara the last time she used it—which was twenty years ago. Between the upbeat, cheerful robo-Tara, and the true, jaded, bitter Tara, the publisher is getting mixed messages—though the AI seems to be making a better impression than Tara herself.

Classic Cage is a play about public personas, optimism and pessimism, and the reconciling of youthful dreams with present realities.

Running time is approximately 40 minutes. The cast is 3F, 2M.

You can download the play in the following formats: PDF — Epub — Mobi — Docx. If you really want to pay me for it, you can set your own price for it on Smashwords.

I’ve also written a post for Public Domain Day, about the Public Domain Review, which you can read here.